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Maruli, after all these months, I feel liberated. With all the people making their personal stories known, the patterns begin to emerge so powerfully that they cannot be denied. Remaining silent for all those years, nothing changed. Speaking out and telling my story, and others telling their stories, we are being heard, not only by the atheist community by the general public. I have hope that family violence will be taken seriously by all the institutions: family, education, health care, laws and law and order. I want you to know how comforting it has been for me knowing you and Ruth cared enough to reach out to me until I assured you I had a strategy. It is all working out as I had hoped.

I really do appreciate your concern and the fact that you are available when people need help. Believe me, there are times when I do need to reach out and I know I have a trusted friend to whom to turn.

Maruli, thank you for your care and compassion. Let me assure you that everything I write is deliberate and for a purpose. I am not venting, although, surely it must sound like it. I want people to wake up to the fact that domestic violence is real, it is in all classes and economic groups, it suffers under so many myths that people don't understand the causes, treatment and prevention.

I don't know how many years I have left, but I sure want to make sure that the public becomes aware and faces the reality of violence in the home.

When I was an army officer's wife I discovered that our abuse records were kept in a locked file away from the other files. My husband was a dentist in the hospital and they were more concerned about protecting him than our children. Seeing that personally, I began asking questions as I did my interviews about where they kept their files for abusing families and heard just a hint of the same practice.

Doing my background work, I found evidence that there is a correlation between occupation of the abuser and child and wife abuse. Researchers looked at a community by occupation and got records from hospitals, doctors, nurses, police, counselors, ministers, priests and rabbis, shelters, and any source that would interface with an abused family. They counted the abuse numbers by occupation of fathers; for every 1,000 carpenters, 1,000 lawyers, 1,000 biologists, etc. This is what they found:

The occupation with the lowest abuse record is symphony orchestra conductors. It seems that a conductors needs cooperation and desire to perform to a level of excellence that requires cooperation, not competition.

It seems there are personality factors that fit a person's personality profile.

1)reference to higher authority; 2) use instrumental behavior (that means the work requires doing whatever needs doing, surgeon cut into people, police restrain people, truck drivers follow rules to reach their destinations.) 3) intolerance for ambiguity (everything is black and white, there is a right and wrong way to do something).

So, you see, family violence is a pervasive, hidden crime that at one time was legal. That is changing, but we still have babies, wives and husbands die in a family violence episode. Thank you for your concern.

It concerns me how too few females feel driven to participate on AN, and how some who do suck-up to patriarchy. I think the atheist movement is going through a difficult period because all the figureheads are defenders of patriarchy. Many young males join with the sentiment that because we're atheist, any sexism issue is simply passé, this makes all ages of females uncomfortable, as sexism is still alive an well, unbeknownst to them.

I like how your personal ad (profile) leaves few stones unturned. So many singles out there seem to think that communication requires no effort and you have to extract info from them as they play being coy.

Welcome to the German Atheists group (writing in English, as you seem to have done all your posting in it so far). I can't guarantee you'll find what you're looking for, but we are slowly but steadily growing in number, so good luck.

"If freethinkers could reason with believers, there would be no believers ---- true common sense helped by science leads to atheist wisdom."

We invite you to make good friends by joining the busy group "ORIGINS: Universe, Astronomy, Life, Earth, Humans, Religion, Gods, Atheism, Evolution, Darwin..." with 500 discussion topics and 3000 members.